Existing home sales dropped 1.8% in June | RioCan says Hudson's Bay unlikely to take real estate public | Professor: GICS means investors can't ignore REITs
July 24, 2017
The daily source on REITs and real estate investment
Existing home sales slipped 1.8% to 5.52 million units in June as a shortage of inventory of homes for sale helped push prices to a record high, according to the National Association of Realtors.
Hudson's Bay will probably not take its real estate holdings public, according to its partner in one venture, RioCan REIT. Activist investor Jonathan Litt, who has a 4.3% stake in the company, is pressuring Hudson's Bay to monetize its real estate.
The creation of a Real Estate Sector in the Global Industry Classification Standard will have a positive impact in the long term because large, generalist investors won't be able to ignore REITs, says Tim Pire, a professor at Marquette University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. REITs are larger and more sophisticated now than in their early days and have become "true corporations that own and operate real estate," he says.
Blackstone Group's economic net income was $705.4 million for the second quarter, compared with $519.8 million a year earlier. Its real estate business led sales for the quarter, selling $4.6 billion of holdings, including shares of Hilton Worldwide Holdings and several Equity Office Properties assets.
Low volatility caused fixed-income trading to fall for most major banks in the second quarter, with analysts naming Deutsche Bank and Barclays as the most vulnerable European entities.
Inland Real Estate Acquisitions has acquired 49 newly developed CVS Pharmacy properties for $211 million. The properties are in 16 states and the portfolio totals 651,216 square feet.
Gramercy Property Trust has acquired the Opa Locka Hialeah Flea Market and 72 acres of land in South Florida for $80 million. Gramercy Property has signed a lease with a new operator for the flea market, one of the largest in South Florida, which plans to invest "over seven figures" in the operation.
Acadia Realty Trust has filed an offering plan for the condominium conversion of 640 Broadway, a historic property that was once known as the Empire State Building. The offering plan has not been accepted; Acadia hopes it would be able to sell the 21 condos for $135.5 million, or $6.5 million per condo.
China's dollar-denominated bond holdings, which have increased nearly 20 times since the financial crisis to more than half a trillion dollars, could give the Federal Reserve pause before raising interest rates further. While the Fed has yet to flag Chinese debt as a concern, analysts expect it to affect interest-rate decisions before long.
The International Monetary Fund lowered its 2017 growth forecast for the US to 2.1% from 2.3% in a quarterly update to its World Economic Outlook, attributing the cut to the Trump administration not introducing policy reforms it had promised. The IMF also trimmed its UK forecast and identified Japan, China, Canada and the eurozone as emerging leaders of global economic growth.